Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
A board seat is the cheapest thing an institution gives away and the most expensive thing it can get wrong.
Since I wrote about governance, people keep asking me to sort trustees into good ones and bad ones. I will not do it. The question is lazy and the answer would be useless.
Here is the question I will answer. What behaviors, when seated at a board table, make a tuition dependent institution slower, poorer, and less able to survive the decade in front of it. That question has answers. I have lived them at multiple institutions.
Who This Is Not For!
If you sit on an owner board, this may not apply to you. Your fiduciary duty and your incentives are aligned by capital at risk. You already have a mechanism.
If you steward a multi billion dollar endowment, this may not apply to you. When the corpus can absorb a bad decade, you can afford trustees who are there for reasons other than institutional survival. You are buying access, prestige, and philanthropic reach, and those purchases have real returns at your scale.
If you govern a system with a legislative appropriation that does not blink, this may not apply to you either.
I am writing for everyone else. I am writing for the institution where tuition is the revenue model, where a bad enrollment cycle is an existential event, and where the board room is one of the few places the future actually gets decided. That is most of American higher education. It is also, quietly, many of the nonprofit sector.
To continue reading, view the full post here
